Following Walter Benjamin's work on Surrealist photography, history and the unconscious, this article examines the performative and historical function of the photographic image in J. G. Ballard's Crash. Ballard's novel, I suggest, stages a contest of sorts between two forms of photographic practice: creative photography, a commercially-driven form of visual practice in which complex historical realities are collapsed into undifferentiated surface images, and constructivist photography, an avant-garde visual practice developed by the Surrealists which forces visual confrontations with undocumented histories and latent physical and psychological realities. Comprising a range of experimental visual techniques, including collage, montage, close-up and rotation, Surrealist photography emerges, I suggest, as a way into the historical unconscious for Ballard; a way of reassessing and rupturing the flat, homogeneous and ideologically-contrived surface images of post-war history and culture. At the same time, however, I want to suggest that Surrealist photography is also a way of challenging the formations of empirical history; a counter-historical process of retrieval and recovery which calls for the mobilisation and narration of an alternative set of histories and realities through forms of associative enquiry. How, for instance, are graphic images of crash-induced injuries in dialogue with narratives of mourning, memory and resurrection? And to what extent does Surrealist photography engage with the traumas, anxieties and exigencies of postwar history and culture?
